Review: Cumberbatch’s Assange anchors muddled ‘The Fifth Estate’

TORONTO – The strongest, clearest expression of an idea in all of “The Fifth Estate” happens under the opening credits, as we watch the evolution of journalism from Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses to the death of print and the rise of the Internet, and while it’s a compelling expression of the idea that how we share important news has changed over time, it also captures one of my issues with the film itself. I don’t concur that print is dead and the Internet has replaced it, and I think it will take the perspective of time before we truly digest what is happening right now to news media.

Telling the story of Julian Assange and Wikileaks is premature, I believe. After all, Bradley Manning was just sentenced last month, and Assange is still holed up in an embassy in London, and the full ramifications of everything that leaked by the website are still being digested right now. In time, we’ll be able to get a full sense of who Assange is, of what Wikileaks really did, and of the impact of their actions, but at the moment, it all still feels like it is unfolding. Ultimately, it seems that this is not the story of Assange and his website, but rather the story of Daniel Domscheit-Berg, whose book “Inside Wikileaks: My Time With Julian Assange At The World’s Most Dangerous Website” is one of the two primary source for the movie. This is the story of how a young computer hacker fell under Assange’s sway, helped him turn Wikileaks into an international presence, and ultimately ended up disillusioned and frustrated by Assange’s agenda.

That’s a perfectly valid way into the story, of course, but it troubles me because making Daniel (Daniel Bruhl) into the hero of the piece doesn’t feel right, either. Sure, they also drew material from “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy” as well, but Domscheit-Berg’s book is very much his perspective on the events and not an impartial observation. I think Julian Assange is a creep, personally, so I’m not upset by the perspective offered up by the film. I just question the motivation of the author. I think it is very easy for anyone involved in something like WikiLeaks to build up a personal mythology that justifies what they did and that harpoons anyone who they disagree with, and it’s especially easy when you’ve got someone like Assange whose behavior is so erratic and self-serving and destructive.

Don’t get me wrong… we live in an age where media is run through so many filters that it is impossible to trust on almost any level. I have major problems with not only the way news is gathered, but the way it is prioritized. I think there are things about “The Fifth Estate” that touch on cogent, important ideas, and I understand the impulse to use Assange’s story as a way into that. I also think Benedict Cumberbatch does eerie work as Assange, vanishing into him to such a degree that it almost feels like Cumberbatch curdled. He looks like he’d smell like bad milk, and he nails that odd lisp of Assange’s as well as the growing vanity the more time he spent in front of cameras. I can’t speak to the accuracy of Bruhl’s performance because the person he’s playing was, by design, never the public face of the site.

Writer/director Bill Condon deserves all sorts of respect for trying to figure out a way to make large chunks of this movie more visually dynamic than you’d expect, considering this is largely about people sitting in front of laptops and typing, but he runs into many of the same issues that were part of all the “computer hacker” movies in the ’90s. The only way you can make this more visually exciting is to try to find a way to make us feel, as an audience, what it feels like to be Assange and Domscheit-Berg as they publish material that they know is going to shake up the status quo, and there are moments where the film captures that quite well. There are other moments where it feels like they just plain push too hard to create a visual metaphor, and it ultimately pulled me out of those scenes instead of allowing me to invest fully in them.

There are also a number of threads the movie follows, characters who drop in and out to convey information to us, but that don’t feel like real characters to me. Many of the actors who show up in the film seem to do so in order to convey a bit of important exposition, but there’s so much they try to fit into the film that there’s no time for the smaller details of human behavior, the things that would make this live and breathe in a way that something like Alex Gibney’s “We Steal Secrets” simply can’t. I think that’s my main complaint… I don’t have a problem with the big ideas of the film or with the ambition of how it’s told, but I also don’t feel like this digs deep in the way that narrative drama can.

Condon was the right guy for this film if you look at his filmography. Both “Gods and Monsters” and “Kinsey” tackle complicated, not particularly easy to like figures from real life and manage to turn their stories into living breathing drama that doesn’t feel the need to sand off all the rough edges. Even in “Dreamgirls,” which is fiction based in part on truth, Condon embraced the rough edges. Those rough edges, those quirks and eccentricities, those are the things that make people interesting. He’s certainly not afraid of a central character who almost dares us to feel empathy for them. It’s not the filmmaker that fails here. It’s the story itself. It’s not a whole story. Not yet. And it won’t be until we see the long term effects of what happened on the people involved and on the larger news media. All the effort in the world can’t invent a neat bow to tie around the story that gives it the shape that a movie demands. There are a number of small strong moments in the film, but taken as a whole, it feels like a muddle.
“The Fifth Estate” opens October 18, 2013.

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Spot on! Daniel Domscheit-Berg is a very unreliable narrator, especially as regards Assange’s character, which of course most of us can only “know” through smear article after smear article about him we’ve read in the press – but Mr Berg’s personal bitterness has been clear throughout his own media career since 2010. Here, for the benefit of your readers, is Mr Berg’s real “true story”:

Domscheit-Berg fled Iceland on 7 February 2010 – 4 days after Chelsea Manning’s first upload to Wikileaks – with some kind of “nervous breakdown”, so he wasn’t even around during Wikileaks’ 2010 releases (remember that as you view all those scenes showing him in the room during the editing of Collateral Murder); quickly met (within the week) and married a “Government Liaison for Innovative Programs” executive for Microsoft (shh! no one say ‘NSA backdoor’); following that, DDB was increasingly frozen out but he kept misrepresenting himself as the “founder” of Wikileaks in the German press; he then sabotaged Wikileaks’ mailserver (and got caught red-handed in the act); purloined Wikileaks donations via the Wau Holland Foundation; stole Wikileaks submission platform and tried to set up a (stillborn) rival leaks organisation; destroyed unpublished whistleblower submissions stolen from Wikileaks; wrote a gossipy and libellous book and has made his fortune by maligning Assange and from cash-in film projects, like this one, ever since.

By: John

09.06.2013 @ 1:45 PM

“Chelsea Manning”…give me a fucking break.

By: Kate

09.06.2013 @ 3:23 PM

Yes, Chelsea Manning. Give ME a fucking break, John. This is HER official name now.

By: John

09.06.2013 @ 3:52 PM

I honestly don’t care whatever this guy’s bizarre sexual perversion is, it’s enough for me that he’s instigated world conflict that has contributed to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, particularly ethnic and religious minorities, and emboldened the sociopathic lunatics that are threatening to rape and kill my entire family. The embassy in the Middle East where my closest family members live and work is routinely evacuated for bomb and chemical threats, which are nearly all accredited to the various Wikileaks publications and the ensuing “Arab Spring” atrocities.

Feel free to continue playing along with the pathetic publicity stunt of a deranged individual completely lacking in any sense of responsibility and personal discretion. My entire life, I have always been strongly against the death penalty, but once in a while there is a case that makes me seriously question my convictions.

By: evolution1085

09.06.2013 @ 4:51 PM

@Kate, it may be what “she” refers to herself as at this point, but at least legally on all the forms for “her” presidential pardon, it’s still Bradley as “she” has yet to legally get a legal name change (also, not trying to be insensitive with the air quotes, but genetics is genetics. As long as you have a Y chromosome, you’re still a dude, no matter what your brain chemistry might have you wired to believe, but that’s a different discussion for a place that doesn’t have to do with a meh movie with a solid leading performance)

By: Lee

09.06.2013 @ 3:35 PM

Seems the reviewer here went in with an attitude about the film even prior to seeing it. The filmmakers have clearly said, all along, that this was just a window into a very particular time in this ongoing reality of Wikileaks. To view with such a pre-formed bias seems unfortunate.

Of course, I have yet to see it and this review will certainly not deter me from doing so.

The description of Cumberbatch’s disappearance into the character is pretty much the man’s trademark of his talent; which is, I presume, the reason he is tapped to play such diverse real life individuals such as Hawking, Van Gogh, William Pitt to Assange.

I will see this movie because of my interest in the subject matter – I see nothing squishy about seeing a film that is about an ongoing subject/experience. Making this film with 2013 perspectives/eyes may well be very different than a film that is made at thend of Wikileaks life span.

I will – keep an open mind. From other reviews I have read, many of which are not glowing, most people acknowledge that Assange is not played in just a two-dimensional portrayal – that he is not hero or devil – which is, of course, the case of most people on planet earth.

By: evolution1085

09.06.2013 @ 4:43 PM

I saw this at at an advance screening a couple months ago, and I walked out of it feeling particularly…. lukewarm. Cumberbatch is immersed in the character and gives a great performance, but there is a definite lack of charisma whenever he’s not around (Daniel’s story just isn’t that particularly compelling). Also, any movie that underutilizes David Thewlis that much deserves a little bit of derision.

By: CinemaPsycho

09.07.2013 @ 7:05 AM

If you don’t think print is dead, would you be willing to quit your job and go work for a newspaper or magazine at this point?

By: POV

09.08.2013 @ 4:33 PM

Interesting review. It feels fair, but then again, as you say — we do not know the whole story yet, do we?

The thing about history is that it is best told at a distance and by tellers who possess scrupulous integrity. Even then, the tale can go wrong because well-meaning and scrupulous people can still misread reality and facts. Can history ever be truly known? Can someone who was trying his best to do right still manage to do wrong? FY to that! Best intentions pave the road to hell. Still, when all is said and done, I am dying to see this movie. So, even if the reviews are sketchy and the movie has flaws, it may still do what movies always want — make a lot of money because people like me just cannot stay away. Also, like others, I suspect — I love Benedict Cumberbach and am still in the phase where I will see him in anything. Eventually, he may disappoint me so much that I will quit him, but at the moment — yeah, he still has me.